Bobby Kennedy and the Critical Realignment that Didn’t Happen

M. Davout

Watching a documentary commemorating the fiftieth anniversary year of Robert Kennedy’s (RFK) tragic run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, I couldn’t help thinking back to a venerable (if also somewhat moth-eaten) political science theory of critical realignment. This theory refers to a national election that radically and durably alters the balance of power in our two party system.

According to one iteration of that theory, these elections tend to occur on an approximately 36 year cycle of presidential elections and manifest in one of three ways: a new party displaces one of the two major parties (as when the Lincoln Republicans, calling for the containment of slavery, completed the dissolution of the Whig Party in 1860); a major party reinvigorates its dominance by mobilizing new and existing constituents around a fresh set of policy issues (as when the Republican Party ushered in a new period of electoral success with the 1896 election of the industrial protectionist McKinley); and when dominance switches between the two major parties (as when Franklin D. Roosevelt won overwhelmingly the first of his four presidential terms in 1932).

Key features of critical realignments include a crystallizing issue, heavy voter turnout, and major and durable shifts in voter allegiance. Political scientists have noted that this phenomenon seems to have petered out with the fracturing of FDR’s coalition in the Sixties. The election of 1968 did not see the emergence of a dominant new party (George Wallace’s success as a third party candidate that year was fleeting), nor did it witness either a renewal of Democratic dominance or a switch to long-term Republican Party dominance (control of the White House and Congress has instead oscillated between the two major parties).

Would the U.S. party system have experienced a critical realignment had Bobby Kennedy avoided assassination and won election as the thirty-seventh president of the United States? It is a question that occurred to me as I watched video footage taken from Kennedy’s funeral train of the people spontaneously gathered along the rail lines in big cities and small hamlets to pay last respects to their martyred candidate.

Mourners await the RFK funeral train (1968)

As one of the Kennedy family friends riding that train noted, those forlorn folks represented Kennedy’s base—Catholics, people of color, blue collar workers, the poor.

Had he lived and gone on to run in the general election, he would have added to these groups the students and liberals who had flocked to Senator Eugene McCarthy’s antiwar candidacy, as well as the party bosses who were supporting the sitting vice-president Hubert Humphrey. And had he won the presidency in 1968 and made significant progress in achieving his stated goals—ending US military involvement in Vietnam, retooling LBJ’s efforts at poverty reduction, fostering a sense of solidarity among racial and generational groups—would that have been enough durably to boost voter turnout and cement loyalty to a more social justice-oriented Democratic Party for decades?

Mourners await the RFK funeral train (1968)

A lot of “what ifs,” I know. But watching the stasis of American politics over the last decades in the face of mounting crises on both the domestic and international fronts, it is consoling to think of a possibility (however remote) of the critical realignment that could have been.

M. Davout, an occasional contributor to Bracing Views, teaches political science in the American South.

15 thoughts on “Bobby Kennedy and the Critical Realignment that Didn’t Happen”

Since M. Davout freely admitted in a previous column that he chose not to make the only righteous choice in the last ultimately binary presidential election, thinly suggesting that others might do the same and everything would work out fine, I’m not sure he should get to play would have/should have now that he has helped to make this hole in democracy a permanent life fixture. If your merit badge says Democrat (and what else is there?) and you so believe that the party philosophy/platform is predominantly right and good, then you should spread enlightenment on this earth, teaching that the party goes beyond the sometimes imperfect figurehead at the top but extends all the way down to the personal and human level to include everything from judges to maintenance workers, who without the figurehead are now powerless and made redundant. So you vote party to get your foot in the only door there is. And if that leaves you with nothing more than an imperfect but sympathetic ear, at least you still have a voice that might be heard and you use that voice to make the figurehead as enlightened as you yourself profess to be. But without an ear at the top, or anywhere in between now, one has to wonder about that tree falling in the woods.

Personally, I don’t think the devout one learned a damn thing from Bobby.

Bobby Kennedy, George McGovern, and Hubert Humphry all hid in the tall grass until someone with an ounce of integrity and some political balls, like Euguene McCarthy, showed them how to take on an unpopular “war” President of their own party. As David Halberstam wrote in The Best and the Brightest (1969):

“Part of the frustration and bitterness, of course, was the feeling in the liberal community – the political segment most aggravated and most offended by the war – that it was powerless, that Lyndon Johnson was a liberal Democrat and could not be beaten, that they had no political alternative. For the mythology lived; one could not unseat the sitting President of his own party. Eventually, however, despite the protests of older liberals (some of whom wanted to fight Johnson only on the platform at the forthcoming convention), younger liberals went looking for a candidate. They had only one choice, they thought, and that was to take the issue to the country and make the challenge to the President within the party. Robert Kennedy was the logical choice, but he was torn by the idea. Part of him wanted to go and was outside the system; part of him was still a traditionalist and believed what his advisers said, that you could not challenge the system. In the end he turned it [the challenge] down. Then they went to George McGovern, who was sympathetic and interested, but he faced a re-election race in South Dakota and that posed a problem. But if no one else would take it, then he told them to come back. So they turned to Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, and he accepted. There comes a time, he told reporters, when an honorable man simply has to raise the flag. ‘What will you do if elected?’ A reporter asked, and borrowing from Eisenhower in 1952, he answered: ‘I will go to the Pentagon.’”

Eugene McCarthy clearly recognized that the U.S. military establishment — trapped and discredited by their endless lies and historically inept Bungle in the Jungle — posed the greatest threat to America’s true national security and prosperity, as they do today with their decades-long Debacles in the Deserts (Iraq, Libya, and Syria) and Humiliation in the Hindu Kush (Afghanisan). Bobby Kennedy had his brief moment of trying to get back in the real game once someone else made it safe for him to come out in the open, but his actual track record shows no evidence of confronting America’s vicious right-wing-only political “spectrum.”

As Barbara Tuchman wrote in The March of Folly (1984):

“The American government reacted not to the Chinese upheaval or to Vietnamese nationalism per se, but to intimidation by the rabid right at home and to the public dread of Communism that this played on and reflected. [In the] social and psychological sources [of that dread] lie the roots of American policy in Vietnam.”

The rabid right at home — the Republicans and the Corporate Democrats — continue their tag-team intimidation of every possible challenge to rule by the corporate oligarchy, no matter how feeble, so that we now see Bobby Kennedy’s grandson, Joseph Kennedy III (and even Bernie Sanders), cravenly bashing “the Russians” in a pathetic imitation of Tricky Dick Nixon and Tail-Gunner Joe McCarthy’s red-baiting of the Democrats in the 1950s and 1960s. As Oscar Wilde wrote: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” Joe Kennedy III and the corporate Democrats have chosen some particularly nasty Republican “greatness” to imitate and, in so doing, have only demonstrated their own mealy-mouth mediocrity.

The Democrats don’t have an FDR in them and seem completely uninterested in ever producing one again. Consequently, I doubt that the Republicans will have any trouble throwing them table scraps while whipping them into grateful submission. Intimidation by the rabid right always works “at home” in America. It worked on Bobby Kennedy just as it has on every “Democrat” since. America could really use a second, unintimidated political party.

And then, of course, the “historic” election of the first U.S. president with a black face in 2008:

Congenital Stockholm Syndrome

He started by giving up quickly,
Surrendering early his case.
He offered to kiss their asses.
Replying, they pissed in his face.

Their urine, he thought, tasted strangely;
Yet not at all bad to his taste.
He’d gotten so used to it, plainly.
Why let such a drink go to waste?

The people who voted in favor
Of him and his promise of “change”
Now see in his many betrayals
A poodle afflicted with mange.

Each time that the surly and crazy
Republicans out for his skin
Condemn him for living and breathing,
He graciously helps them to win.

He’ll turn on his base in an instant
With threats and disdain and neglect
While bombing some Muslims so Cheney
Might thrill to the lives that he’s wrecked.

A black man in love with apartheid
He offers his stalwart support
To Zionists and their extortion
With “More, please!” his only retort.

A masochist begging for beatings
Obama takes joy in abuse
Receiving just what he has asked for
Which makes him of no earthly use

The little brown men that he’s murdered
In homes far away from our land
Bring profits obscene to his backers
Who give him the back of their hand.

Obama seeks praise from the vicious
Republicans, no matter what.
He suffers, apparently, nothing
So much as his need to kiss butt.

Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2011

What “virtue signalling” gimmick will the bankrupt and useless “Democrats” come up with next? Trying to combat the Republican’s Culture-War with Transvestite Identity-Politics doesn’t seem to have worked out so well. Neither has the pathetic Russophobia. And making heroes out of the CIA and FBI — Can’t Identify Anything and Furtive Bungling Idiots — where did that come from? The Bay of Pigs, Gulf of Tonkin, WMD, and J. Edgar Hoover? “You can’t beat something with nothing,” or so the saying goes. But when you can’t even beat a billionaire real-estate fraud and cable-tv game show host like Donald Trump — who keeps shamelessly running to the left towards the embittered American working class while the Democrats look for graduate-degree Republican women’s votes on Martha’s Vineyard — I’d say that President Donald Trump and the Republican party don’t have much to worry about.

In any event, the same class of billionaire donors gives to both right-wing political factions so that whoever wins will owe their victory to the same pile of money. As long as they get their own little share of the table scraps, I don’t think the Democrats even care if they lose. Hence, the corporate oligarchy’s simple siren song:

I don’t see what Bobby Kennedy has to do with where we “lower class” Americans find ourselves today. No one in the Democratic party “leadership” gives a damn about us one way or another. At least the Republicans will show up to lie and promise that Jesus will come back soon. The Democrats can’t even bother to do that.

“But when you can’t even beat a billionaire real-estate fraud and cable-tv game show host like Donald Trump — who keeps shamelessly running to the left towards the embittered American working class while the Democrats look for graduate-degree Republican women’s votes on Martha’s Vineyard …”

Yes, the Democrats can’t shed the limousine liberal label. Having Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi as the faces of the party doesn’t help. The Democrats still aren’t offering a compelling alternative vision to Trump. All they are saying is, ‘We’re not Trump!” and “Russia-gate.” Is that enough for a blue wave? It’s doubtful.

“At least the Republicans will show up to lie and promise that Jesus will come back soon. The Democrats can’t even bother to do that.”

It’s possible that Trump is the least religious president in our nation’s history, yet his support among evangelicals is strong and steadfast. They love him for his sins, not for his virtues. And moving the embassy to Jerusalem and being vaguely anti-abortion while shouting “Merry Christmas!” — well, that’s enough for them, adultery and greed and lies and all the other Trumpian sins be damned.

Looks like we’re living the curse, “May you live in interesting times.”

Speaking of great lines, I loved that remark by Eugene McCarthy: “I will go to the Pentagon.” It reminds me of something Adlai Stevenson once said when he ran for president. A supporter once called out, “Governor Stevenson, all thinking people are for you!” And Adlai Stevenson answered, “That’s not enough. I need a majority.”

I’ve already written a great deal elsewhere about the political realignment in the United States that occurred subsequent to President Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, after which he said: “I just lost the South.” So much for the grand coalition forged by FDR during the Great Depression. I could continue with this, but I’ll save further comments till tomorrow when I’d really like to get into Thomas Frank’s several books and journalism articles regarding right-wing populism — or “culture war” — and its wildly successful application by the Republican party (with the willing capitulation of the Democrats) in rolling back the New Deal and working-class progressivism in favor of global imperial corporatism.

Clinton and his fellow Democrats believed the best way to win was to run (and even rule) as “moderates,” meaning Republican-lites. That tactic drove the Republicans even further to the right, leaving us with essentially one business/war party in the USA (the Democrats are slightly less eager to embrace the national security state and corporate imperatives, but only slightly). Old-school, FDR-like Democrats like Bernie Sanders are dismissed as crazed socialists with pie-in-the-sky ideas (health care for all — that’s crazy talk!).

This fall, some Democratic candidates are embracing the Sanders’s line, but the MSM in the U.S. portrays these candidates as radical progressives. The typical headline: “Is Candidate X too progressive to win?”

I promised myself, “no more blogging under the influence,” but screw it! I can’t wait to weigh in on this!

I’ve always heard “it’s not about whom you vote FOR, but whom you vote AGAINST.” I’ve seen it before, and I think you’ve even mentioned it once, but I’d like to be able to vote for the greater of two goods, once in my life. Maybe I should go back to Russia – at least I have a friend who owns an apartment in Moscow who might be willing to give me a a break on rent! I’m serious about that, by the way, but japes about Moscow real estate aside, I’ve already written my two units of currency on this subject, https://kjworldsong.wordpress.com/2018/08/10/green-is-the-ugliest-colour/
and as I’ve pointed out, the DNC seems to be running with the never-Trump brigade, in spite of the fact that Trump himself is more of a big-money NYC dem than a typical Republican.

On that note, since the dems seem to be leaning even further to the left these days (making even my teenage “godless communist” self blush), whatever happened to the whole idea of the Democrats being the party of LABOUR? (Pardon my British spelling, that’s how I learned English in the first place), but aren’t these people supposed to be catering to the workers, rather than their corporate masters? Wait, so now it’s Trump and “his” Republicans who are standing up for the blue collars, while the Democrats are bleaching their own?

I don’t see the Democrats recovering from this suicide by socialism. They’ll go the way of the Whigs, and we’ll end up with a glorified one-party dictatorship. You know, Russia is looking pretty good right now, if only I’d picked a career in the oil industry!

Thanks for weighing in, KAJA. “Socialism for the rich and cut-throat capitalism for the working poor” has worked very well for those who keep throwing around inane terms like “left” and “right” as a way to deflect the conversation from the “up” vs “down” nature or real life in the United States. As the uber-investor Warren Buffer likes to say: “There’s a class war going on all right, and my class is winning.” No joke. But let us not hear of any fighting back from those on the bottom of Pharaoh’s pyramid.

Anyway, I wrote the following twelve years ago in 2006, but I think it remains just as relevant today: the unfolding saga of America reducing itself to passive intellectual incarceration, mesmerized by the moving colored images emanating from a glowing television screen; like the island aborigine Boobies cut off from the world’s cultural mainland; like prisoners kept underground who can only see shadows dancing on the walls of their cave and not the marionettes and puppeteers on the elevated stage behind them who produce and cast the shadows that they mistake for reality. In the accelerating economic insecurity enveloping so many Americans today, we can see the usual and historic:

It happened back in Vietnam
Some two score years ago
When those within the upper class
Declined to serve, and so
They coined Selective Service to
Select who wouldn’t go

They called themselves the brightest and
They called themselves the best
And then they sent their countrymen
Into a hornet’s nest
But not themselves, of course, because
They’d passed the privilege test

These parents of a George and Dick
Thought Communism bad
But worried that some other lands
Would find it not as sad
As slaving for the rich ones whose
Rank greed had made them mad

So sympathizing with the rich
No matter what they did
The parents of a George and Dick
Sent someone else’s kid
To fight the dreaded communists
No matter where they hid

But not their George and Dick, of course,
They couldn’t spare the time
And Vietnam seemed far away
Immersed in war and grime
An atmosphere too turbulent
For orchids in their prime

These studly hot-house orchid types
Worked hard to dodge the light
Their parents helped them jump the line
To keep them out of sight
Arranging for deferments that
Would keep them from the fight

And so the years of war went by
And communism won
Which had exactly no effect
On those who had the fun
Of skipping out and turning tail
To take off on the run

Soon Vietnam recovered from
The blasting it had got
And communists turned businessmen
To hatch a common plot
With those who liked cheap labor
And cared less why some had fought

Still some remained embittered by
The waste made of their lives
And swore they’d never live again
Like worker bees in hives
Content to feed the rich who dined
With sharpened forks and knives

But Boobie schools taught only fraud
And fiction to the young
With fantasy and fables coined
To see the truth unstrung
Till history became a fog
That never bit or stung

On schedule, Boobie Dick and George
Found Politician Town
And learned that pandering for votes
Could win some safe renown
Affirmatively actioned up
They never could fall down

The millions seemed to flow their way
And stuck to them like paste
They spent what others raised for them
With no thought for the waste
Since someone else’s money had
The sweetest sort of taste

They made a deal between themselves
To do a pantomime
With Dick to do the thinking while
George mouthed a lisping rhyme
And so with the Supine Court’s help
They grabbed for our last dime

The Boobie George then tripped and crashed
Into this truth sublime:
That Boobies hated freedom and
Considered it a crime
Dick told him then what he should do:
Just work them overtime!

With not a moment left to think
The Boobies wouldn’t know
Where all their beads and shells had gone
Or why they couldn’t show
A single thing as evidence
That they had labored so

Once George and Dick gained access to
The treasury’s largesse
It hardly seems surprising that
It soon contained much less
A fact which few observers seemed
To think of with distress

But “stupid is as stupid does,”
The stupid do and say
Confronted by a wealthy thief
They genuflect, then pay;
With eyes and minds shut fast like that
They make such tempting prey

I still can’t believe the bovine stupidity of the HRC “I’m With Her” campaign signs from 2016 showing a large arrow pointing to the right. And, of course, as conventional political wisdom in America has maintained for decades now: “The Clintons are always there when they need you.” Just what the Democratic party needs: a snake-haired Medusa for a cover girl. You know:

“We came. We saw. He died,” she cackled,
This chicken hen hawking her bile,
Amused at the bleeding and shackled
Gaddafi upon whom would pile
Jihadists with red hatred spackled,
And all so Dame Clinton could smile.

Or, alternatively:

On hearing of Gaddafi’s savage murder
She smiled and joked: “We came. We saw. He died.”
Apparently, she thought that those who heard her
Would share her chickenhenish war-slut pride.

She campaigned in her youth for Bomber Barry
Goldwater, who from Arizona came;
Who made his money ripping off the natives
On reservations where he staked his claim.

Our You-Know-Her worked hard for Bomber Barry
Who swore that if elected he would kill
Vietnamese who found us less than scary
In numbers that would break their iron will.

A pantsuit with no principles or vision
Just raw ambition: naked, stark, and vain.
If peace might happen, war is her decision.
Goldwater’s Girl is just a John McCain.

Great comments here. 1968 was one of the most profound, tumultuous years in our history: Tet offensive, American body count going up in Vietnam, capture of the USS Pueblo by the NOK’s, MLK and RFK killed, Six Day War, attack by Israel on the USS Liberty, mass demonstrations, riots in our cities, the Chicago Democratic Convention, the rise of George Wallace and return of Nixon.

Eugene McCarthy was a hero to many of us in the Boomer Generation, he narrowly lost the New Hampshire primary to LBJ . There were bitter feelings against RFK once he climbed on board, after the New Hampshire primary. RFK had the name, money, party establishment and the Liberal Elite behind him. (Sounds like $hillary Clinton.)

Some writers have offered their opinion that the blame for the Hump’s loss to Nixon rests with the demonstrators that were beaten up in Chicago at the Democratic Convention. This time it was not some fat-ass Southern Sheriff and his deputies beating up Black people, it was young white kids being beaten up, while the whole world watched. The result was not that our Police were a bunch of goons in uniforms, but they were saving America from lawlessness and anarchy.

I was working at the time in a steel mill in South Chicago. The older generation – The Greatest Generation were unanimous in their opinion that those Hippies got what was coming to them a good beating Chicago Style. Well we got the Law and Order Candidate Richard Nixon elected.
*******************************************
Trump, Corporate Media Are Both Enemies of the People.
CNN’s liberal and anti-Trump talk show host Erin Burnett was in crisis mode last week. She was rolling her eyes, anxious for the fate of the republic. The cause of her angst? A Gallup poll showing that 57 percent of the nation’s Democrats now respond more favorably to the word “socialism” than they do to “capitalism”—this compared with 47 percent of Democrats who prefer “capitalism” over “socialism.”

Burnett interviewed Jen Psaki, a Democratic commentator and former communications director in the Obama administration, and a gloating Republican political commentator named Scott Jennings. She and her two guests agreed that this dreadful socialism business augured certain defeat for the Democrats in 2018 and 2020.

Sanders, who openly identifies as a socialist, was found in a Harvard-Harris poll last year to be “the most popular politician” (Newsweek) in the U.S., or that a good majority of the Democratic Party’s base prefers “socialism” to “capitalism.”

The dominant U.S. commercial and corporate media are a means of mass consent-manufacturing indoctrination, diversion and dumbing down on behalf of the nation’s intertwined corporate, financial, imperial and professional-class “elites.”

How could it be otherwise? Just six massive and global corporations—Comcast, Viacom, Time Warner, CBS, the News Corporation and Disney—together control more than 90 percent of the nation’s television stations, radio stations, movies, newspapers and magazines. Corporate ownership combines with other deeply entrenched factors to guarantee the not-so-mainstream media’s dutiful service to the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money, class and empire: the controlling power of corporate advertisers (the mass media’s main market, not the public); the disproportionate purchasing power of the affluent (the main target of advertisers); the elitist socialization, indoctrination and selection of journalists, and the dependence of media on government for information, access and monopoly power.

Hey, I’m going to stir up a hornets’ nest here, since we’re on the subject of dead politicians and the Vietnam War:https://d.tube/#!/v/styxhexenhammer/khm1numv
I know, I know, but give him a chance: Styx makes excellent commentary on both politics and alt-tech. Now, for those of you shouting “too soon” at your computer, by all means, take a few days to grieve, and then come back to the topic. I, meanwhile, will by sitting back and watching the fire rise and laughing like the maniac I am.

I don’t know what else to add to this, I just want to see where it goes (assuming that link actually works). Bloody hell, am I turning into a troll?